It has long been a goal of electrostatic loudspeaker designs to deliver widely dispersed sound, particularly at high frequencies, without the narrow and directional beaming that often occurs. Examples of electrostatic speaker designs in the prior art to which a broadened dispersion was sought can be found in: LINDENBERG, U.S. Pat. No. 2,615,994; ROD, U.S. Pat. No. 3,345,469; JANSZEN, U.S. Pat. No. 2,896,025; STANTON, U.S. Pat. No. 2,934,612; STEEDLE, U.S. Pat. No. 1,809,754 and KUEHN, U.S. Pat. No. 2,916,562.
A common mechanism which many of the above inventors used was a faceted, angled or curved placement of the speaker units to widen the horizontal angles of sound radiation. This proved to be a useful device but it did not allow for a widening of dispersion or directivity in the vertical dimension of the listening area.
The orthodox use of quadratic speaker profiles and their accompanying bulky, mechanically fastened frame structures in the prior art limited the disposition of the grouped units to cylindrical curvatures along the horizontal dimensions. This approach does not take into account the spherical nature of sound wavefronts and limits the speaker produced wavefronts to fragmental and often planar sections of the original three dimensional sound envelope. Further, the spherical nature of sound radiation suggests the need in reproduction processes of recreating the original source wavefronts as closely as possible for faithful fidelity.
The present invention described herein provides improvements to basic speaker elements, construction, assembly and performance characteristics as they relate to the above described design goals. Additionally, the present invention because of its advantageous design parameters which depart from the commonly used methods has the ability to be applied to many figurations including combined geometries which can yield thereby applications suited for differing spatial environments.